Broken Porcelain
by angelicattie
Summary: Glitch's re-braining causes some complications. When one half of his brain has overcompensated for what's missing how can he be put back together?
1. Chapter 1

Disclaimer: I don't own Tin Man.

A/N: This was a plot bunny that I stole from glitchwyatt livejournal community

Cain watched Glitch from the other end of the dining table. He had been to many dinners at the palace before, but this was the first when he hadn't been sitting next to and been thoroughly involved with, Glitch. It had happened over a week ago, during a typical moment of casual closeness, Glitch had given him a penetrating look with wide eyes and said, "We don't fit anymore." and then he frowned. Cain remembered saying, "Look, Sweetheart, you fit right here in my arms." in a thick voice as he tried to keep his heart from breaking, tightening the embrace around his scarecrow. Glitch had kept on, "We fit before, when you were a little fixed and I was a little broken, but now I'm a lot broken." he looked away, " . . . a lot broken . . . " It wasn't a glitch, just thoughtful.

"Or at least now I know how broken I am." He gave one of those remorseful chuckles he always did when something wasn't remotely funny. Cain had wanted to say they were still just as broken as ever; a smashed vase and a rusty spittoon, that he could fix Glitch, but it was true, they didn't fit anymore. Glitch was missing his past the same as Cain had missed all those years on the outside while he in the suit praying for vengeance for Jeb and Adora. Zero had been punished for what he had done and Cain was reunited with Jeb, putting the ghost of failing Adora to rest. Glitch's past, however, had become a walking, talking apparition, showing him exactly what he was and what he could have been, without Az, without DG, and without Cain.

When they first tried to settle Glitch's brain back into his head Glitch went completely out of commission. At first his heart rate had risen dangerously while his breathing slowed. Then after a few hours, when that had equalized with an oddly syncopated rhythm, he had to be bound because he began seizing. After a day the seizures had mostly stopped, but were replaced with a loss of intelligible speech and frequent involuntary movement. Glitch/Ambrose couldn't swallow anything other than his own saliva (when he focused enough to coordinate that) so he had to be fed intravenously. It had been hell. Cain had spent each day by Glitch's bed. The worst day had been the day of the seizures, it was excruciating to watch Glitch continuing to seize for fifty minutes, no rest for his body or his dueling minds. There had been struggling and restraining,trying to hold his jaws shut just to keep Glitch from choking on his own tongue. After that Glitch just looked at Cain with teary eyes when he could manage to keep the lids from fluttering and forced out, "I can't."

So Cain told the Queen to take the brain out.

The Queen wanted Ambrose, so she told him to wait.

Healers came, monks prayed and meditated, many Viewers came, Raw came and did the best he could with his sight.

On the best day Azkadelia and DG used their magic to try to settle the two sets of conciousness together. It had been really nice. When Az and DG unclasped their hands, Glitch opened his eyes and looked to Cain, saying, "Hello Stranger." with a smooth smile that didn't have the quirk to his lips as it would have on Glitch's face. Glitch/Ambrose had dressed himself, been able to eat real food, and even ask the cooks to make his favorite dishes, recounting the recipes that had been lost during the time the wicked witch had run things. Everyone had laughed at the stories he told about the Queen's secret trysts with Ahamo. In one story Ahamo was visiting the queen at night and had meant to alight into the Queen's bedroom from his tethered balloon, but he had misstepped and fallen to the ledge the next floor down. The Queen couldn't go down to get him herself (it being a secret that Ahamo was there and she indecent in her nightgown) so she sent a servant to get Ambrose. Then after poor Ahamo had been there on that ledge, clinging for dear life Ambrose comes to the window, swiftly pushing the curtains open and nearly scaring Ahamo to death.

"And let me tell you, Ahamo is no featherweight." Glitch/Ambrose confided, clearly incredibly amused to be able to tell the story.

Later on they found one of Ambrose's old records and Glitch/Ambrose had danced, first by himself, pantomiming a partner with over the top dips and throws. Then DG had asked for the next dance and had been happily obliged. Then a slow bluesy number came on and Cain cut in. Glitch/Ambrose had moved with all the grace Glitch had displayed in battle, but the look he gave Cain all through their intimate movements was so intent it had sent shivers down Cain's spine. That night they had lain in bed together just holding one another, every moment so precious that there could be nothing more perfect.

"It's a miracle," Cain had whispered to Glitch/Ambrose, "You're well and you're here with me."

Cain awoke to Glitch/Ambrose's flailing arms. Overnight the man had regressed almost to where he had been right after the surgery. It would have been selfish to keep doing that to this person who had been through so much, to rewire him every morning and forget about the consequence until the next. So Cain petitioned the Queen again.

And the Queen had seen the day that Glitch had been restored to something like her advisor, she still wanted Ambrose.

The queen was not without mercy, they induced something like a coma in Glitch. Ahamo and his daughters built a body for the new Ambrose, looking just the way he had in the memory Raw had shown them, young and lithe with unscarred porcelain skin, a taut young face that had no adornment but faint laugh lines. Cain though it completely lacked that character that made Glitch, Glitch.

The surgery came, and the brain that had been in the jar all those years was placed in the new vessel.

The two bodies had risen at the same time.

"Good Morning Sweetheart." Cain said to Glitch before kissing him softly.

"Ambrose." the Queen had cooed at her manufactured doppleganger.

"My Queen." It had replied as she pulled her best friend close and his head came to rest against her shoulder.

Now here they were, all dressed and strewn about the Queen's dining table in all her finery, gleaming mahogany wood, gold leaf on the walls, and a crystal chandelier above them. Cain sat, still watching Glitch across the table who did his best to nonchalantly ignore Cain except when he couldn't remember to, and then stared at Cain longingly. Cain loved Glitch's soul, but maybe now that Glitch knew how he could be, he didn't feel soul or rhythm could hold up compared to all he lost. The Queen and Ahamo sat in their traditional places at each end of the table, Cain supposed to give some protocol to the complete unconventionality of their relationship, but Ambrose sat at her right hand. They talked intensely and laughed at one another; all culture, knowledge, and social erudition. As Cain watched them he tried to understand how those academic things made up for heart and soul.


	2. Chapter 2

I disclaim any ownership of Tin Man.

I've been alive three weeks now, not to say that I wasn't alive before, but the perceptual experience of being a brain in a vat, deprived of typical senses, is not what would be considered living by most human beings. However, before the advent of this life I have memories of being alive. I remember having a childhood and taking lessons from my tutor in my mother's home. The memories are altered now though; the word tutor has a new pronounciation atttached, Toto, and it brings to mind a vision of black terrier dog instead of my own tutors, Mistress Imelda and later on Doctor L.H. Carmine who I came to call Doctor L. I can remember a history up until I was prepared for surgery by Azkadelia's Medicos and then only the the slowly developed conciousness of the jar. I was compelled to maintain the Sun Seeder because it was the only external process that I could engage in. Without that continuous operation my mind's fuctions would not have been able to continue with only my own memories to occupy it. When I recalled things in the jar I did not experience the secondary associations as I do now, it must have happened in the meantime.

When I speak of my mind's fuctions I find it diffcult to reconsile myself a person with a mind, I am arguably all mind now, the ghost within Ahamo's machine. It certainly is not the body I knew from birth. I don't like the face, they overdid it, my eyes are larger now and my nose shorter, and even more bladelike and elegant. They made this face too pretty, and I flush far too easily and more intensely now. I know that Ahamo and the girls knew nothing of how I hated the mocking and teasing in my youth of my delicate countenance, but the Queen should have known better. The body is too young, the joints are loose and they reduce my movements to that of a gangly teenager. It's all so sensitive too, water too hot in the shower raises a heat rash on my shoulders and arms, too cold and I get goosebumps that last for hours. I look young as well, it feels like being denied the honor of my years, I earned the right of respect for someone my age at first glance without having to explain that I'm not some wandering young noble but the Queen's most respected advisor.

Still, what right do I have to complain? I have been freed, I am my own person, I just wish it weren't so hopelessly unulfilling.

I see that Tin Man and I try not to think about it.

How do you ignore a person who reminds you of a metal suit and fresh fallen snow? How do you ignore a man who has blue eyes that make you tremble and give you the sensation of dancing, lighter than air?

Worst of all, when I hear his voice I dream of our perfect day.

In all my years I have never felt as loved as when he let me pull him close as we swayed together, or when he lay next to me and called the feeling we shared a "miracle." Then I see Glitch and I am so envious that he got Cain. That goofy, bumbling, brainless, him that isn't me but has everything that is mine, my body, my dancing, my laughter, _and_ he gets love.

Its not fair, the balance of the universe is tilted. I am the one who served the Queen all these years, I am the one would should be rewarded, compensated with love. Isn't that infantile of me to even believe that the world is governed by any law of equality or reciprosity when it comes to humans, when it comes to me. Even if cosmic balance existed, the biological machine that is me was the threat to the world. This I that is and is not was Azkadelia's ultimate weapon, all those years of self-preserving involuntary servitude have to count for something.

So if I can reason myself to be righteously undeserving, how is it that this repugnant hope welled up inside of me when I saw Cain and Glitch sitting separately at the dinner table? Has human psychology always been this difficult to understand?


	3. Chapter 3

Ambrose stood on the balcony of his room, he looked northwest toward Emerald City and wondered if he might find greater satisfaction in that sea of strangers. He closed his eyes in contemplation of a new life. All of a sudden the air smelled sweeter and felt smoother and headier in his throat.

Glitch sat in his room on the floor. His windows and balcony doors were open. A circle of paper surrounded him composed of sheets of fine cream colored pages, some blank, some covered with quick chicken scratch in ink and graphite. Inside the circle was scattered with the hollowed husks of blades of straw, outside lay the seeds and chaff of the straw. Glitch shuffled and turned about in his makeshift threshing ground, surveying his circle of diagrams and glyphs. He clutched a lump of tin tightly in his right hand which he shoved in his mouth, still whipping about and scanning the documents. One page finally struck him and he pressed his palm to it, drawing it into his grasp, breaking the circle. He spat the tin onto the dark hardwood floor of his bedroom, before the break in the circle, the moonlight kissed it's gleaming saliva coated surface. The page came from breakfast, this one had started with a heart, small and dark at the center of the page, it was Cain's. He drew his own, damaged and worn tethered to it. As he had drawn it he thought about how Cain's heart had grown as Glitch worked to get under the Tin man's skin; he began tracing over it, darkening it, and making it larger and larger.

The chaff blew in upon the midnight wind through the break in the circle. It clung to the ejaculated tin in the floor, appearing magnetized to it. In the lamplight there was a mottled cast to the burnished heart of Cain on the paper. Glitch turned over the page in his hand, transferred to the heart was an image of a brain from his morning newspaper._ Aha, so it's as simple as that_, Glitch thought as he looked at the solution he had crafted. _So Cain will be happy_. Glitch sighed a bit disappointed that the solution to his and Cain's sadness didn't include him clinging as the other half of Cain. But he picked up his page and clipped it to hang from the mobile decorating his room. He climbed into his bed and put himself to bed thinking of ways to get his brain and heart connected with his own two hands.

Cain had just come home from Jeb's house. Jeb was living with his fellow former rebels, the ones whom had been in the the movement at least since Azkadelia had set her sights on the Mystic Man although some of them like Jeb had been in the resistance for years. The household had been just seven of the men, mostly Jeb's age, but they seemed to expect a visit from several of their former comrades every evening. The constant hospitality and new faces coming in and out helped Cain to feel less like an outsider or a meddling old man among the rowdy young bucks. For now they were holed up together in their old hideaway, Cain knew the Queen had given them war pensions and a stipend for "reformation work" with the intention that they would buy their own acreage and households, but it seemed the boys had yet to cash in their checks.

Cain enjoyed going to Jeb's when he could, seeing his son made him feel less regret about allowing himself to be entrapped. It was difficult to lament what could have been when Jeb had grown into someone so admirable. In the jovial atmosphere of those opinionated young men discussing politics, telling war stories he felt young again even if not one of them. Cain imagined that it was probably the comfort and camaraderie that prevented them from striking out on their own, feeling that they were old war horses that would never find wives who could understand. Although as Cain recalled one of the boys, Ken, enthusiastically discussing checks in the system and ending the system of elites and nepotism he wondered if they might find a better use for their money than playing house. The best thing about spending his evenings at Jeb's was that it helped him ignore his loneliness now that Glitch was no longer with him. Back at the palace in the familiarity and comfort of his own room he was alone with his memories. Even pouring hot tea into his mug brought a vision of Glitch across the table of of his kitchenette, smiling behind that very mug. "Thanks boyscout, you'll earn your badge any day now." Bright and teasing with a raised eyebrow before his expression blanked, him mind chasing motes of tangents, surprised when Cain removed the mug from his fingers and kissed him.

Cain cursed his sentimentality that wouldn't let him throw away that cursed piece of ceramic as he bitterly sipped his tea.

Ambrose grinned at his reflection in the bathroom mirror. His hair was shorn into a mess of short lengths, nothing falling past his ears. All of a sudden he felt like he had some control over who he was again. Exhilarating. OK, so the image in the mirror didn't look like him, he was neat and kempt and orderly, but what did it matter? Ambrose didn't _feel_ like Ambrose, the image in the mirror had never been Ambrose to him. At least now it was something new, and no longer a cheap imitation.

Ambrose went to bed still dreaming of a new existence unfettered by the past he carried.


End file.
